Astronomers with the Gemini North Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii have released the primary spectrum from a brand recent spectrograph able to peering deep into the veils of cosmic dust that line our universe.
The spectrum shows details of an expanding cloud of gas and dirt that a sun-like star ejected at the tip of its life. This cloud is generally known as a planetary nebula — perhaps a misleading name because it doesn’t have anything to do with planets. More specifically, this nebular is formally called NGC 7027, or the Jewel Bug Nebula, and sits about 3,000 light years away from us within the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan.
The brand new spectrograph that managed to watch the sunshine of the Jewel Bug Nebula is called IGRINS-2, which is brief for Immersion Grating Infrared Spectrograph-2. It’s a high-resolution instrument that operates at near-infrared wavelengths of sunshine — wavelengths unseeable by human eyes — specifically between 1.45 and a couple of.45 microns. Cosmic dust is opaque at visible wavelengths, which our eyes can see, but near-infrared light can penetrate through that dust and detect what secrets lie beneath. That’s why the James Webb Space Telescope can also be said to have the power of peering behind deep space dust curtains. It’s probably the most powerful near-infrared wavelength detectors we’ve.
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As for the “immersion grating” bit, it is a form of diffraction grating that uses transparent and reflective mediums to separate light into its component wavelengths. That is what IGRINS-2 did with the infrared wavelengths to attain the colourful, detailed spectrum we see.
IGRINS-2 is an updated version of the unique IGRINS spectrograph, in-built 2014 by scientists on the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) in addition to the University of Texas.
IGRINS 1.0 has already been across the block, with periods of being installed as a “visiting instrument” on quite a few telescopes including the two.7-meter (8.9 feet) Harlan J. Smith Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas, and the 4.3-meter (14.1 feet) Discovery Channel Telescope at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. And since 2020, IGRINS has been installed on the 8.1-meter (26.6 feet) Gemini South Telescope in Chile.
Now, the opposite half of NOIRLab’s International Gemini Observatory, namely Gemini North, is receiving IGRINS-2 — and on a everlasting basis.
Built over again by scientists and technicians at KASI, the first-light spectrum of the Jewel Bug Nebula is just the start. Following a period of integrating the instrument into Gemini North’s sub-systems and getting it to work with the telescope’s software, IGRINS-2 will primarily goal regions of star-birth, in addition to star-death within the case of NGC 7027, exoplanets, cool brown dwarfs that radiate mostly within the infrared, and distant galaxies swathed in dust during a few of the more tumultuous stages of their evolutions.
“The flexibility of IGRINS-2 to look inside otherwise opaque regions of the universe will allow us to raised understand how stars are born and plenty of other astronomical phenomena hidden behind galactic dust,” Martin Still, the National Science Foundation’s Program Director for the International Gemini Observatory, said in a statement.
IGRINS-2 identified elements akin to isotopes of bromine, helium, iron, krypton and selenium in NGC 7027, plus copious amounts of molecular hydrogen. With the powerful light-gathering capability of Gemini North’s 8.1-meter mirror at its disposal, we will expect IGRINS-2 to make much more detailed observations and plenty of major discoveries in the long run.